Gregor Čremošnik from the Savinja Valley – a Balkan explorer

Abstract

Gregor Čremošnik was born to a large rural family on 24 February 1890 in Ločica pri Polzeli. He studied Slavic languages and history at the University of Graz and obtained his doctorate in 1915. Then his life brought him to Bosnia, where he remained for nearly two decades (from 1917 to 1935) performing the office of custodian at the National Museum in Sarajevo. He began his academic career in 1935 in Skopje, at the Faculty of Arts, as a professor in medieval history, and concluded it in Ljubljana (from 1946) at the Faculty of Arts as the chair of the Department of the History of Southern Slavs. He drew his materials for scholarly studies from the archives in Dubrovnik. He mainly focused on the economic history of Dubrovnik and neighbouring Balkan states and delved into one of the most complex questions of medieval Serbian history, i.e., that of the monetary system. Čremošnik also broke new ground in the research on diplomatics, palaeography and sigillography of Cyrillic documents.